Sometimes you plant some vegetables...

So we got the house a little late in the planting season. But we wanted to see if we could grow something anyway. I did some quick research online, and some vegetables can grow through the fall and even the winter. So we thought we'd give it a try. Also, it helped that I got all the seeds for free at the Tool Library(just like the library, but for tools. You can borrow all sorts of tools for free!). So I tried it in a small patch of neglected backyard.

It was fun, let's see what we can harvest, if anything.

Oh, and of course, I timelapsed it. So here's a quick video of that:

Sometimes you are baffled....

One of my coworkers is a field tech, so he goes out to many facilities for various issues. And today, he ran into this:

Someone, perhaps several people thought it prudent to do this! Make the bathroom into the networking closet...I love how the modem(silver box to the left) is just hanging off a water pipe. And of course they made "drip loops" for the cable, but under the toilet tank!! That this exists is just baffling to me. And by the way, my friend says there was plenty of other places they could have used, so he was confused as well as to why they would do this. So yeah....nice networking closet.

Sometimes you break the restroom...

When we moved in, we knew some work would need to be done to the bathroom. This is what we started with:

And you can't really tell in the pictures, but towards the toilet, the floor was uneven. It was pretty bad, like  huge bump, and then an incline down towards the wall. I just thought it was uneven. I had no idea that it would be rotten swollen wood....

We knew there was some moisture issues in the bathroom. But nothing of the scale that we found...We pulled out the vinyl to check what we were dealing with, and it was pretty bad. Completely soft wood that was water damaged and crumbed to the touch. So we started removing some of it. And this is what we got now:

So yeah, we need to fix this quickly. Hopefully by this weekend. I foresee a trip to a home improvement store and lots of work this week! haha

Sometimes you go plum picking...

In your front yard! I had seen squirrels feasting on the plums, and it was cute. Although they are wasteful eaters haha They would eat like half, then throw it! I thought they weren't ripe yet, cuz well, they're green.

Then I was out gardening, saw one fell from the tree, no squirrel around to throw it. Checked it out, tasted it, and it was damn good. So we went plum picking! First day it was kinda dark, so we just got a bowl of pums. Next day we got Sophie's sand bucket full of plums. So we made a plum pie. It still baffles me that food just grows on trees and out of the ground. I don't know why that seems so crazy to me...

So with such a surplus of plums, we made a pie. Sophie had been wanting a pie for a long time. So we made one out of plums :)

It's not a looker, but it was yummy :D And we have been eating plums like crazy since haha

Sometimes you wash the deck....

So cleaning the deck was on our list of things to do. And while I expected it to look better than it did before, I was definitely not expecting such a radical transformation! Took me about six hours of work total, over the span of 3 days. But I could not be more pleased with the results. Here is a before and after of the washing of the deck:

Probably the best $10 we've spent in a while(that's how much the wood cleaning solution cost). And here is a timelapse of the cleaning and the sealing:

Sometimes you paint the same wall 7 colors...

So we've been working on painting Sophie's room for a long time now(like 3 weeks). Mainly because we almost only get to work on it on the weekends, the walls needed a lot of prep work before painting, and it is a huge room(13ft x 21ft / 4m x 6.5m). So after nail, staple, and tape removal, because for some reason, the previous occupants decided that taping over nail holes, then painting over the tape was an appropriate solution, we sanded, and spackled, and sanded and spackled(probably not the right word lol) some more...

Sophie insisted that we make a checklist, since she was getting impatient with her room, and wanted to see some sort of progress:

Finally, we were ready to paint. We started with the blue wall:

Then we painted the white parts, which was the ceiling wall, and 2 other walls. Then Geli came up with the design for the feature wall. We finally got around to doing that wall yesterday. We started last week though, and painted white along the "border" lines of the design. So it would be dry by the time we were going to tape over that. Then we taped what would become the white border lines, and got to painting:

Here are almost 6 hrs of work timelapsed into less than one minute:

Sometimes you garden...

So I go in to work at 8am, and Geli leaves like at 6:30am. Sometimes(not often lol), I am up when she leaves. So I go outside and try to tidy up the garden/yard. I really like it. Last week what stopped me from doing more gardening and clean up was that the trash can for yard debris/compost was full. In one day I filled it up. Same today. The yard was very neglected(and yet it doesn't look that horrific, yay Portland!). So even just taking out all the dry weeds/plants that have accumulated fills up the full size trash can for yard stuff. Pretty crazy. So yeah. I didn't take any pics of this yet . So when I think the garden looks alright, I will take a pic haha

Sometimes you organize....

Your videos on youtube. Probably just to procrastinate, cuz there's tons to do in the house, but since Sophie had been wanting to watch videos of her when she was little, and I didn't like clicking on each video to play it, then back, or opening a million tabs, I organized them into 2 playlists in chronological order(only because 200 is the limit, else I would have done one):





Now, we really should get the house in order lol....tomorrow, Sophie soccer in the early morning(9am!), and then grocery shopping, and then the house in order, and painting Sophie's room!